The Lying Game

by Ruth Ware

  I want to believe that it was all a mistake. That he never meant to kill, that he only wanted to humiliate Ambrose, to have him dial 999 and be found in a pool of heroin-tainted vomit, sacked from his job, suffering the way Luc was about to suffer in return. He was the child of an addict, who had grown up around heroin, and he must have known the unreliability of an oral overdose, the time it would take for Ambrose to die, the possibility of reversing the effects.

  But I’m not certain.

  In a way, it doesn’t really matter any more. What matters … what matters is what he did.

  He did just as Kate had told us, in her strange, cold, step-by-step account of actions she was taking responsibility for. He bunked off school, making his way back to the Mill in the daytime when he was sure that Kate and Ambrose would both be at Salten House. There he poured Ambrose’s stash into a screw-top bottle of wine and left it on the table for him to find when he came home from school that evening, and then he gathered up the most incriminating drawings he could find, and sent them to the school.

  Oh, Ambrose. I try to imagine his feelings when he realised what Luc had done. Was it the odd taste of the wine that alerted him? Or the strange sleepiness that began to steal over him? It would have taken time … time for Ambrose to notice what was happening … time to put two and two together as the heroin filtered through his stomach lining and into his blood.

  I sit there, holding Freya’s hand, and in my mind’s eye, I see it all, unreeling like a sepia film. Ambrose examining the bottle, and then getting up, his feet unsteady. Walking to the dresser, where the tin was concealed. Opening it up … and realising then what Luc had done, and the size of the dose he had swallowed.

  What did he think, what did he feel as his crabbed hands scratched out those wavering letters, begging Kate to protect her brother from the consequences of what he had done?

  I don’t know. I can’t begin to imagine the pain of realising what had happened, the magnitude of the mistake that Luc had made, and the bitter impulsive revenge he had taken. But there is one thing I am sure of, as I look down at Freya, and feel her fingers tight on mine. For the first time, I understand Ambrose’s actions. I understand them completely, and it all makes sense at last.

  His first thought was not to save himself, but to protect his child. The boy he had raised and loved and tried and failed to protect.

  He had let Luc go back to that hell, the sweet trusting toddler he had saved from the Reach as a baby, and whose nappies he had changed, and whose mother he had loved, before she fell apart.

  He had let Luc go once, and now he understood that from Luc’s perspective, he had been planning to betray him once again. I was foolish not to see where my actions would lead … I am doing this so that no one else will have to suffer …

  He wrote that note to make sure that only one life would be forfeit – his own. And he wrote it to Kate, not Luc, knowing that she, who knew her father better than any other person in the world, would understand and know what he was saying – that he was asking her to protect her brother.

  Don’t blame anyone else, my sweet. I have made my decision and I’m at peace with it … Above all, don’t let all this be in vain.

  And Kate … Kate carried out her father’s wishes as best she could. She protected Luc, she lied for him, year, after year, after year. But one part of Ambrose’s letter she could not fulfil. She did blame Luc. She blamed him bitterly, for what he had done. And she never forgave him.

  Luc was right after all. She could have waited until they were both sixteen before she told the police that Ambrose had disappeared. But she did not. And so he was taken away, back to the life he thought he had escaped.

  And Luc, who had killed the only real parent he ever had for love of his sister, saw her turn cold, and turn away from him. When he was sent back to France, he knew it was Kate’s doing – Kate punishing him for the murder only she knew he had committed.

  I remember his cry, sobbing out in the night, I would have done anything to be with you … it was only ever you …

  And I think my heart might break.

  Rule Five

  Know When to Stop Lying

  IT IS NOT Owen who comes to collect Freya and me from the hospital – I still haven’t called him – when, in true NHS style, Freya and I are abruptly discharged at 9 a.m. the next day because they need the bed.

  My phone was burned up in the house, like everything else, and they let me ring from the nurses’ station, but even as my fingers hover over his number, something inside me fails, and I can’t face the conversation we must have. I tell myself my reluctance is down to practicalities – it would take him hours to traverse rush-hour London and the snarled-up grid of motorways between us. But it’s not that – or not only that. The truth is that last night, as Freya’s life flashed before my eyes, something inside me shifted. I just don’t know exactly how, and what it means.

  Instead it is Fatima I call, and as I stand outside the paediatric wing, Freya huddled in a borrowed blanket, I see a taxi pulling up, and Fatima and Thea’s pale faces at the windows.

  When I climb in, buckling Freya into the seat Fatima has sensibly organised, I see Shadow lying flattened on the floor at Thea’s feet, her hand on his collar.

  ‘We were discharged horribly early this morning,’ Fatima says over her shoulder from the front seat. There are dark circles under her eyes. ‘I’ve booked us into a B&B on the coast road. I think Mark Wren will want us to stick around, at least until the police have spoken to us.’

  I nod. And my fingers close over the note in my pocket. Ambrose’s note.

  ‘I still can’t believe it.’ Thea’s face is white, her fingers move nervously in Shadow’s fur. ‘That he … Do you think it was him? The sheep?’

  I know what she means. Was it Luc? Did he do that, as well as everything else? I know they must have spent the night as I did. Thinking. Puzzling. Trying to work out the truth from the lies.

  I look at Fatima.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. ‘I don’t think so.’

  But there I stop. Because I don’t want to say what I really think. Not in front of the taxi driver. He’s not Rick – I don’t recognise him. But he must be a local. And the truth is, of all the things Luc did or didn’t do, I think that we were mistaken in suspecting him of that.

  I thought that he wrote that note because he hated Kate, and suspected her of covering up Ambrose’s death. I thought he wanted to scare us into confessing. I thought he wanted the truth to come out.

  But later, when Kate told me about the blackmail and the money, I started to wonder. It didn’t seem like Luc, somehow. Not that cold-blooded calculated draining of her resources. I couldn’t imagine Luc giving a damn about the money, but trying to even up the scores – make Kate pay for the suffering she had caused him … yes, that felt like something he might do.

  Now though, after last night, I don’t believe it any more. It makes no sense. Luc, alone of all of us, except Kate, knew the truth, and he was lying even more than the rest of us. He was part of the Game just as much as we were and he had more to lose than any of us if the truth came out. And besides, in that long night in the hospital I have had time to think, to remember that list of convictions that Owen sent me, and one date on it sticks in my mind.

  No. I think someone else wrote that note.

  I remember her fingers in the post office, strong fingers, with blood under the nails.

  And I am certain, in a way that I wasn’t with Luc, that she is capable of this.

  When I get to the B&B I crawl into bed with Freya, and then we both fall into sleep like bodies sinking into deep water. I surface, hours later, and for a moment I have the strangest sense of disconnection.

  The B&B is on the coast road, just a few miles up from the school, and the view from my room as I sit up, adjusting my dishevelled, salt-stained clothes and smoothing Freya’s sweaty hair away from her face, is exactly the same as the view from Tower 2B, all those years ago
.

  For a second, even though my daughter is asleep beside me, I am fifteen again and I am back there – the sound of the gulls in my ears, the strange clear light splashing across the wooden windowsill, my best friend in bed beside me.

  I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the past, imagining myself back into the skin of the girl I once was, a girl whose friends were still around her, whose mistakes were ahead of her.

  I am happy.

  And then Freya stirs and squawks and the illusion is broken, and I am thirty-two and a lawyer and a mother again. And the knowledge in the back of my mind that I have been wrestling with all night comes down upon me like a weight.

  Kate and Luc are dead.

  I scoop Freya up and we make our way downstairs, yawning, to where Fatima and Thea are sitting in the sun porch overlooking the sea.

  It is July, but the day is chilly and grey, and the clouds threaten rain, their dark streaks the exact shade of the grey fur that ripples along Shadow’s spine. He is curled at Thea’s feet, his black nose in her hand, but he looks up as I come in, his eyes bright for a moment, and then he sinks back. I know the person he was looking for. How do you explain the finality and unfairness of Kate’s death to a dog? I barely understand it myself.

  ‘We got a call from the police station,’ Fatima says. She draws her knees up in the chair, hugging them to herself. ‘They want us to come in at four this afternoon. We need to work out what to say.’

  ‘I know.’ I sigh and rub my eyes, and then put Freya down on the floor to play with some old magazines left there for guests to read. She tears at the cover of one with a little shriek, and I know I should stop her, but I am just too tired. I don’t care any more.

  We sit for a long moment in silence, watching her, and I know without asking that the others have spent the night as I did: struggling to understand, struggling to believe what has happened. I feel as if yesterday I had four limbs, and today I have woken with only three.

  ‘She broke the rules,’ Thea says. Her voice is low, bewildered. ‘She lied to us. She lied to us. If only she’d told us. Didn’t she trust us?’

  ‘It wasn’t her secret to tell,’ I say. I am thinking not just of Kate, but of Owen. Of the way I have lied to him all these years, betraying our own unwritten rules. Because there is no right answer, is there? Just a trade – one betrayal for another. Kate had the choice of protecting Luc’s secret, or lying to her friends. And she chose to lie. She chose to break the rules. She chose … I swallow at the realisation. She chose to protect Luc. But she chose, too, to protect us.

  ‘I just don’t get it,’ Fatima bursts out. Her fists on the chintz cover of the armchair are clenched. ‘I don’t get why Ambrose let it happen! An oral overdose takes time, and even if he didn’t realise what was happening straight away, he clearly knew what was happening in time to write that note. He could have dialled 999! Why the hell did he spend his last moments telling Kate to save Luc, instead of trying to save himself?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t have a choice,’ Thea says. She shifts in her chair, pulls the cuffs of her woollen sweater down over her ragged fingers. ‘There’s no landline at the Mill, remember? I don’t even know if Ambrose had a mobile in those days. Kate did, but I never saw him with one.’

  ‘Or maybe …’ I stop. I look down at Freya, playing on the rug.

  ‘What?’ Thea demands.

  ‘Maybe saving himself wasn’t the most important thing to him.’ There is no answer to that. Fatima only bites her lip, and Thea looks away, out of the window towards the restless sea. I wonder if she is thinking of her own father, and asking herself whether he would have made the same choice. Somehow I doubt it.

  I think of Mary Wren, of her words at the level crossing. He would have walked through fire for those kids …

  And then I remember something else she said, and my stomach shifts.

  ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I say. Thea looks up.

  ‘You were asking in the car, about the sheep, and I couldn’t tell you then, but –’ I stop, trying to marshal my thoughts, trying to explain the conviction that has been spreading like a shadow across my mind since that lift to the station. ‘We thought it was Luc because it fitted with what we knew, but I think we were wrong. He had as much to lose as us, with the truth coming out. More. And anyway, I’m fairly sure he was in custody that night in Rye.’ They don’t ask me to explain, and I don’t volunteer to. ‘And there’s something else – something Kate told me when I came down without you both.’

  ‘Spit it out,’ Thea says gruffly.

  ‘She was being blackmailed,’ I say flatly. ‘It had been going on for years. That’s what the sheep was about, and the drawings. It was a way of suggesting that she start bleeding us too.’

  ‘No!’ Fatima says. Her face is pale against the dark headscarf. ‘No! How could she not tell us?’

  ‘She didn’t want us to worry,’ I say helplessly. It seems so futile now. How I wish she had told us. ‘But it just doesn’t seem like something Luc would do – and besides, it started years back, while he was still in France.’

  ‘Then who?’ Thea demands.

  ‘Mary Wren.’

  There is a long silence. For a minute they both just sit, and then, slowly, Fatima nods.

  ‘She’s always hated Kate.’

  ‘But where’s this come from?’ Thea asks. Her fingers move restlessly in Shadow’s fur, smoothing his ears, the smoke-coloured hairs catching on her rough, bitten skin.

  ‘It was on the way to the station,’ I say. I press my fingers to my forehead, trying to remember her words. My head is aching and Freya’s joyous shrieks as she shreds the magazine are making it worse. ‘Mary gave me a lift, and she said something … I didn’t pay attention at the time, I was too shocked about what she’d said about Kate and Luc … but she said something about Kate and the sheep, she said she’s got blood on her hands, and not just sheep’s blood either. But how would she know about the sheep?’

  ‘Mark?’ Fatima guesses, but Thea shakes her head.

  ‘Kate didn’t call the police, remember? Though I guess the farmer could have called it in.’

  ‘He could,’ I say. ‘But I’m pretty sure Kate paid him to keep quiet. That was the point of the two hundred pounds. But it’s not just what Mary said, it – it was the way she said it. It was –’ I break off, struggling to find the words to explain. ‘It was … personal. Gloating. Like she was pleased Kate’s chickens were coming home to roost. That note, it was venomous, do you know what I mean? It reeked of hate, and I got the same feeling from Mary when she said those words. She wrote that note, I’m sure she did. And I think she sent the pictures too. She’s the only person who could have got hold of all our addresses.’

  ‘So what do we do?’ Fatima asks.

  Thea shrugs.

  ‘Do? What can we do? Nothing. We say nothing. We can’t tell Mark, can we?’

  ‘So we just let it go? We let her threaten us and get away with it?’

  ‘We keep lying,’ Thea says grimly. ‘Only this time, we get it right. We sort out a story and we stick to it, and we tell it to everyone. To the police, to our families – everyone. We’ve got to get them to believe that Ambrose committed suicide, it’s what he wanted after all. It’s what Kate wanted. But I just wish we had something to back up our story.’

  ‘Well …’ I put my hand in my pocket, and I draw it out – an envelope, with Kate’s name on it, very old and much folded, and now salt-stained and water-marked as well.

  It is readable though – just. The biro ink has bloomed, but not washed away, and you can still make out Ambrose’s words to his daughter: Go on: live, love, be happy, never look back. And above all, don’t let this all be in vain.

  Only now it feels like he is speaking to us.

  THE TAXI DROPS us off on the promenade at Salten, and as Fatima pays the driver, I get out and stretch my legs, looking not towards the police station, squat and concrete next to the seawall, but out
– towards the harbour and the sea beyond.

  It is the same sea that greeted me at the window of my room at Salten House, the sea of my childhood, unchanging, implacable, and that thought is somehow reassuring. I think of all that it has witnessed, and all that it has accepted into its vastness. The way that it is taking the ashes of the Tide Mill back for its own – Kate and Luc with it. Everything we did – all our mistakes, all our lies – they are being slowly washed away.

  Thea appears at my elbow, looking at her watch.

  ‘It’s nearly four,’ she says. ‘Are you ready?’

  I nod, but I don’t move.

  ‘I was thinking,’ I say, as Fatima steps back from the cab, and it pulls away.

  ‘About what?’ she asks.

  ‘About …’ The word comes to me almost unbidden, and I say it with a sense of surprise. ‘About guilt.’

  ‘Guilt?’ Fatima’s brow furrows.

  ‘I realised, last night, I’ve spent seventeen years thinking that what happened with Ambrose was our fault, in a way. That he died because of us – because of those drawings, because we kept coming back.’

  ‘We didn’t ask to be drawn,’ Fatima says, her voice low. ‘We didn’t ask for any of this.’

  But Thea nods.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she says. ‘However irrational it was, I felt the same.’

  ‘But I realised …’ I stop, feeling for the right words, groping to pin down a realisation only half formed in my own mind. ‘Last night, I realised … his death was nothing to do with that. It was never about the drawings. It was never about us. It was never our fault.’

  Thea nods slowly. And then Fatima links arms with both of us.

  ‘We have nothing to feel ashamed of,’ she says. ‘We never did.’

  We are turning to walk towards the police station when a figure comes out of one of the narrow twittens that wind between the stone-built houses. A massive figure, swathed in layers of clothes, with an iron-grey pigtail that flutters in the sea breeze.

  It is Mary Wren.

  She stops when she sees us, and then she smiles, and it is not a pleasant smile – it’s the smile of someone who has power, and intends to use it. And then she begins to walk across the quay towards us.